Finflow: How a Kazakh AI startup helps businesses manage their finances

Daulat Aitmakhanov, Founder and CEO of Finflow, Instagram

How It All Began

I am a financier by education: I studied in South Korea and earned a bachelor’s degree in international finance. I am also an entrepreneur: this is my second startup.

I founded my first startup in 2018 — it was the ISSU.kz project, an e-commerce startup.

It was a subscription service for beauty products targeting a female audience: customers subscribed for 30,000 tenge and received a set of samples from various cosmetic products to test them. We worked on this project for a little over three years, and it was acquired in 2021.

Parallel to my return from Korea in 2016–2017, I also engaged in financial consulting: I helped small and medium-sized businesses, as well as other startups, with financial management issues, company valuation, fundraising, and income and expense optimization. During this time, I assisted more than 90 companies. In the process of working, I noticed that 80% of entrepreneurs in Central Asia have serious problems with financial management. As a result, they face cash flow gaps and difficulties in raising capital — whether bank loans or investments — because a proper financial accounting system is not in place.

I realized that I could solve these problems manually, but this is not scalable.

Thus, the idea emerged to create an AI-financial assistant — a digital helper that would assist entrepreneurs in building financial models, making forecasts, preparing budgets, and answering any financial questions.

In the summer of 2023, my two co-founders and I decided to focus entirely on this project.

Startup Launch

In August 2023, my partners and I decided to start working on the project full-time. We had our own funds — about $20,000 — which we planned to use for testing hypotheses and creating the first MVP prototypes.

From the very beginning, we targeted the US market, not focusing on Central Asia.

We created a basic MVP with simple if-else algorithms and a minimal website and began promoting it in the US, specifically in Silicon Valley.

We organized email campaigns via LinkedIn, used warm introductions, arranged demo calls with entrepreneurs, and conducted CustDev and Jobs-to-be-Done interviews.

Quite quickly, we realized that entering the US market would be difficult: quality standards and user expectations there are very high.

Consumers demanded a high-quality, error-free product that fully solved their problem, while we, as a young startup with limited resources, could not yet provide that.

After the initial results, we decided to switch to the local market, offering the product at a more affordable price.

Thanks to the collected quantitative and qualitative data, we managed to attract the first angel investments — about $80,000 — from local and international investors: among them are Alibi Sansyzbai, Evgeny Matveev, and Livan Kavtaradze. With these funds, we improved the product, launched the beta version on the Kazakhstani market, and began independent promotion.

Results: over $35,000 in revenue and 81 initial users, some of whom became paying customers. We received a large amount of feedback and better understood the needs of end users.

Target Audience

Our target audience changed three times. Initially, we targeted startups — early-stage IT companies for whom our product was supposed to help with creating financial models, forecasts, and company valuation using AI. However, this hypothesis did not prove true, as startups were not sufficiently solvent.

Then we switched to small and medium-sized businesses, as they had similar problems but more practical ones. These companies face difficulties in maintaining financial records, optimizing expenses, calculating income and taxes, financial planning, and preventing cash flow gaps. We began solving these problems, and our audience became more solvent. Over the past six months, since the launch of the beta version, we have acquired 80+ initial users, 40 of whom became paying customers.

However, while working with paying users, we encountered another problem — small and medium-sized businesses’ access to capital.

Small and medium-sized businesses often face difficulties in raising working capital for expansion. We realized that entrepreneurs find it hard to obtain loans for business development. Therefore, we began working with banks, helping entrepreneurs collect financial documents in minutes, analyze them for errors, and accelerate the loan approval process. 

Ultimately, our target audience is small and medium-sized businesses, as well as banks that provide loans to entrepreneurs.

Incubation Programs

When I was working on ISSU.kz, I started participating in acceleration programs at Astana Hub. While working on Finflow, my partners participated in the Techpreneurs incubation program at Astana Hub, and then continued acceleration in the IRA (Investment Training Program) from MOST.

Currently, I am participating in the acceleration program of the European fund Startup Wise Guys, which helps scale the product into European and Azerbaijani markets. The acceleration is conducted online, and upon completion of the program, the fund also invests in the project. 

We also actively participate in startup battles and exhibitions. We became one of the winners of the startup battle at Digital Almaty, receiving $15,000 and the title of the most scalable startup. We participated in the FAIR.AI exhibition in Almaty, where we gained access to the Hero Training acceleration program.

Challenges

The first challenge is finding the right customer: a target audience with a clear pain point that your product solves. This is solved only through constant hypothesis testing and active communication with potential customers: you need to regularly receive feedback on the product, solution, usability, value, and pricing. The key is constant contact and close interaction with the audience.

The second problem for us is development. As a startup with a limited budget, we faced the need to hire expensive senior or middle-plus developers. The process was complicated by the fact that we constantly changed features and hypotheses. Developers had to adapt quickly and release the product. We solved this by using part-time specialists who worked on multiple projects simultaneously and aimed for rapid releases.

The most important advice is to start communicating with customers and trying to sell even what does not yet exist as soon as possible. For this, you do not need to wait for a perfect product; a minimal wrapper is enough: for example, an MVP, landing page, or website. Start selling and testing sales channels and customer acquisition channels.

As for development, this is a process that, perhaps, will never be fully resolved. It is important for the founder to attract capital and ensure the team has the resources to work at the pace required for product release. This requires angel and investment resources.

My advice to founders: do not wait for the product to be ready to start attracting investments. Fundraising is a long process. Start getting to know investors from the very beginning, build relationships, send them monthly updates, invite them for coffee. Then, when the product is ready and the first traction appears, you will be able to secure support more effectively.

Achievements

A year ago, we raised $80,000 in investments. Currently, we are closing a round of $500,000, of which 60–70% has already been raised, and we plan to complete the round.

We have also partnered with two local banks — BCK and RBC, conducting pilots on their customer bases. This is an important achievement, as we are working with our target audience.

We have also attracted an international venture fund from Hong Kong — Raccoon Ignite Ventures. This fund is interested in investing in startups in Central Asia and intends to provide loans to small and medium-sized businesses. Moreover, it has become our client, using Finflow as a platform for financial analysis and startups in small and medium-sized businesses. This is an important achievement for us, as we have acquired an international client.

Our team consists of eight people, including three co-founders: Amir Shabanov — CTO, Nurdaulet Samen — COO. The development team is actively supported by advisors such as Raushan Sagalbayeva — a financier with 20 years of experience in Seattle, and Daurien Malaev — ex-CTO of Choco Raketa, Choco Travel/Aviata, an expert in developing complex systems with over 15 years of experience. We also have commercial and fundraising advisors, including Serik Shanmanov — an advisor on building a B2B sales department.

I am proud that we managed to assemble such a strong team at the start.

Plans

According to our plan, in the coming year we intend to increase MRR by 10 times, to $50,000 in monthly recurring revenue, which will require more than a thousand paying customers. Currently, we are testing and studying the markets of Uzbekistan and Azerbaijan. We plan to scale in Central Asia, including cities such as Astana, Almaty, Tashkent, and Baku. Our target audience is about three million small and medium-sized businesses, and this is a fully achievable goal.